This special remote type stores file contents in directory.

One use case for this would be if you have a removable drive that you want to use to sneakernet files between systems (possibly with encrypted contents). Just set up both systems to use the drive's mountpoint as a directory remote.

With the exporttree=yes parameter, the directory contains a tree of files with the same filenames used in a branch of your repository. Without that parameter, the directory contains a directory structure similar to .git/annex/objects or other special remotes like rsync.

Bear in mind that you can also use a regular git clone of your git-annex repository, rather than a directory remote.

configuration

These parameters can be passed to git annex initremote to configure the remote:

  • directory - The path to the directory where the files should be stored for the remote. The directory must already exist. Typically this will be an empty directory, or a directory already used as a directory remote.

  • encryption - One of "none", "hybrid", "shared", or "pubkey". See encryption.

  • keyid - Specifies the gpg key to use for encryption.

  • chunk - Enables chunking when storing large files.

  • chunksize - Deprecated version of chunk parameter above.
    Do not use for new remotes. It is not safe to change the chunksize setting of an existing remote.

  • exporttree - Set to "yes" to make this special remote usable by git-annex-export. It will not be usable as a general-purpose special remote.

  • importtree - Set to "yes" to make this special remote usable by git-annex-import. It will not be usable as a general-purpose special remote.

  • ignoreinodes - Usually when importing, the inode numbers of files are used to detect when files have changed. Since some filesystems generate new inode numbers each time they are mounted, that can lead to extra work being done. Setting this to "yes" will ignore the inode numbers and so avoid that extra work. This should not be used when the filesystem has stable inode numbers, as it does risk confusing two files that have the same size and mtime.

Setup example:

# git annex initremote usbdrive type=directory directory=/media/usbdrive/ encryption=none
# git annex describe usbdrive "usb drive on /media/usbdrive/"